As the year winds down into its darkest days, I hope you’ll join me for one of these events. If you come to two, I will give you a lollipop.

Friday, December 2, at 8 pm: The Furnace Says Goodnight at Hollow Earth Radio. Thirteen Furnace writers contributed pieces that Corinne and I have woven into a single story. The pieces are at turns raw, luminous, defiant, and hopeful. I’m super excited to see the collaboration come alive on stage. And there will be klezmer music! Please come help us celebrate our last performance. If you’re not in town, you can tune in online at hollowearthradio.org.

Tuesday, December 13,at 7 pm: Seattle Fiction Federation at Richard Hugo House. A fiction-full night! I’m reading alongside Steve Sibra, Lucy Hitz, and Donna Miscolta, whose story collection Hola and Goodbye just came out from Carolina Wren Press. There’s also an open mic, so come with up to 5 minutes of fiction to share.

I wrote the story on the way home from my trip to the Netherlands this May, after overhearing a tourist at Anne Frank House say of the diary, “it’s just paper.” It’s (unfortunately) been feeling pretty timely this past week. The trip was made possible by the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, which brought me there to research my third novel. I’m forever grateful for that opportunity.

The story will be available in print later this year in Volume 2. If you’d like to hold the story in your hands and support a great journal, you can subscribe here!

]]>https://ancawrites.com/2016/11/17/dont-worry-in-moss/feed/0microscopicladybugugo-rondinone“Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum” in Los Angeles Review of Bookshttps://ancawrites.com/2016/10/06/dark-fruit-in-los-angeles-review-of-books/
https://ancawrites.com/2016/10/06/dark-fruit-in-los-angeles-review-of-books/#respondThu, 06 Oct 2016 15:00:00 +0000http://ancawrites.com/?p=3028]]>

Italian prune plum galaxy

I’m thrilled to have my essay “Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum” appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books today. It collages personal stories with discussions of Tolstoy, Herta Müller, Gregor von Rezzori, ancient Chinese poetry, visual art, horticulture, superstitions, and more. I’m grateful it found a home in such a fine venue!

Jacopo Ligozzi (Italian, 1547 – 1627 ), A Marmot with a Branch of Plums, 1605, brush with brown and black wash, point of the brush with black and brown ink and white gouache, and watercolor, over traces of graphite on burnished paper, Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, Purchased as the Gift of Helen Porter and James T. Dyke 2007.111.121

Fun news: We just installed my short story “Cauliflower Tells You” in the storefront window of V2, a temporary collaborative art space in Capitol Hill’s old Value Village. If you’re in Seattle, stop by anytime! This is part of Artist Trust‘s 30th birthday celebration, which will culminate in a party on October 22. The party will feature art, music, film, readings, and performances from:

Prior to the party on the 22nd, you can drop in during Capitol Hill Art Walk on October 13, 5-8 pm. Hope to see you on the 13th or 22nd!

A fantastic cat is one of Cauliflower’s neighbors: “Lion” by George Rodriguez.

Find the ice pick.

Examining the final product with Brian McGuigan, Artist Trust’s Program Director.

]]>https://ancawrites.com/2016/10/04/cauliflower-tells-you-on-display-at-v2-in-capitol-hill-for-artist-trusts-30th-birthday/feed/0microscopicladybugangledcatstripsanca-and-brianKingfishers, herons, newshttps://ancawrites.com/2016/09/09/kingfishers-herons-news/
https://ancawrites.com/2016/09/09/kingfishers-herons-news/#respondFri, 09 Sep 2016 23:25:14 +0000http://ancawrites.com/?p=2976]]>I’m back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight–its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!

Now I’m in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:

On Sunday, September 18, I’m teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.

On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust’s 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.

Finally, I’m pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House’s new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.

In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming–a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here’s a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I’ll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.

You can pick up an anthology with this excerpt and those of all the 2015 fellows here. Many thanks to Kevin Craft, Levi Fuller, Joan Rabinowitz, and everyone at Jack Straw Cultural Center!

]]>https://ancawrites.com/2016/08/18/jack-straw-podcast-excerpt-from-paralegal-and-interview-with-kevin-craft/feed/0microscopicladybugJack Straw logoWomen in Translation Monthhttps://ancawrites.com/2016/07/26/women-in-translation-month/
https://ancawrites.com/2016/07/26/women-in-translation-month/#commentsTue, 26 Jul 2016 23:00:07 +0000http://ancawrites.com/?p=2915]]>Women in Translation Month is around the corner! Last year, I compiled a list of translated books by women that I enjoyed and created a Women in Translation Bingo game. I also wrote about novellas by Marguerite Duras and Eileen Chang and poetry collections from Rocío Cerón and Angélica Freitas.

This summer has been a bit more hectic as I’ve been teaching more, taking my second novel through an eighth draft, and researching my third novel. However! I’m excited for Women In Translation Month and wanted to share with you four books on my to-read pile.

What have you been reading?

]]>https://ancawrites.com/2016/07/26/women-in-translation-month/feed/7microscopicladybugWITMonth2016Memory and Imagination at Hugo Househttps://ancawrites.com/2016/07/14/memory-and-imagination-at-hugo-house/
https://ancawrites.com/2016/07/14/memory-and-imagination-at-hugo-house/#respondThu, 14 Jul 2016 18:55:36 +0000http://ancawrites.com/?p=2898]]>There are just five spots left in Memory and Imagination, my one-day generative class at Hugo House. Join me for a Saturday afternoon of writing from memory and the senses! Wisdom from Rikki Ducornet, Jorge Borges, and Vladimir Nabakov will offer insight in the process. And here’s Umberto Eco on the subject, in The Name of the Rose:

“This, in fact, is the power of imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.”

]]>https://ancawrites.com/2016/07/14/memory-and-imagination-at-hugo-house/feed/0microscopicladybug“Mapping Imagination” in Airplane Readinghttps://ancawrites.com/2016/05/16/mapping-imagination-in-airplane-reading/
https://ancawrites.com/2016/05/16/mapping-imagination-in-airplane-reading/#respondTue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000http://ancawrites.com/?p=2876]]>I just got my contributor copy of Airplane Reading, an anthology about air travel edited by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich which includes my essay “Mapping Imagination,” about traveling to Argentina to research my first novel.

Thanks to the tremendous generosity of the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, I spent the earlier part of this month in the Netherlands, researching my third novel. M came as my trusty research assistant, furnishing highlighters, snacks, and sweaters with alacrity. There’s a lot of information crammed in my skull right now, which I am organizing as best I can, hoping it seeps into the crevices of my subconscious fruitfully.

In the moat by the citadel in ‘S-Hertogenbosch, an egret bullied ducks until a trio of geese chased the egret to the boardwalk where it loomed. This continued on a loop for a while. A seagull swooped down to chase the egret further and when the egret returned, the geese trailed it, sinister and slow. Sinister, at least, until we realized there were goslings near.

In a canal in Rotterdam, three loons had a lovers’ spat. Slapped wings, held heads beneath the water–murderous! Not far from there, we strolled past the “swan bridge,” soaring and modern.

On our last night in Amsterdam, we stayed at a fanciful b&b on the Western Canal Belt. Our hostess could not greet us when we arrived. She hid our keys in a flowerpot. Up two steep, narrow flights of stairs, we flung open the door. The lights were on, the doors and windows open, a gust of wind coming from the terrace, which led to another room with another open door, and the flutter and chirp of green and yellow parakeets, in a big cage looking down upon the Keizersgracht canal. Old books stacked everywhere, art on the walls and leaning upon the books, a laptop left on a long wooden table, half open, as if our hostess had left in a hurry. It had the feel of that computer game Myst, where mysterious rooms, empty of people, always suggest a presence, a place quickly abandoned. We did meet her late that night and in the morning at breakfast the birds flew freely about the room and she would call to them and air kiss them and talked to us about Argentina and Barcelona and photography and her love of Amy (Winehouse).

Apropos of birds, on the flight back, I finished Noy Holland’s debut novel Bird, a raw gorgeous thing. Here, I leave you with an excerpt:

She was hungry again and gorged herself on chicken fried steak and skittles, on vermilion faces of canyons, cliffs you could dig with a spoon.